


You've Been Framed!

by xaritomene, xrysomou



Category: All-American Rejects, Bandom
Genre: Glasses, Idiots in Love, M/M, Stupidity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1332883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaritomene/pseuds/xaritomene, https://archiveofourown.org/users/xrysomou/pseuds/xrysomou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyson has a bit of an obsession with Nick's glasses, but he never meant to break them. Scrambling to get back into someone's good graces is, it turns out, less fun when they can't really see it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've Been Framed!

**Author's Note:**

> First written on LJ in 2010.

Tyson isn’t above admitting that he has something of an obsession with finding out just how blind Nick actually is without his glasses. He’s long-sighted, Tyson knows, but sometimes he hides Nick’s glasses, just to watch Nick stumble blearily around the apartment, squinting and running his hands over every available surface.

(Though unfortunately, Tyson hasn't had much luck in kidding Nick into running his hands over _him_.

"Look at me, Nick! I'm a footstool!"

"No, you're not, you're a giant man on his hands and knees, now _give me my fucking glasses_!")

Tyson’s kind of a dick sometimes – he knows and accepts this.

More unfortunately still, Nick's perspective goes to shit when he can't see, and thanks to Tyson's legs sprawled out over the carpet, he trips over to land on his ass with a thump.

"Ow!"

Tyson sticks his tongue out. "Baby."

Nick scowls, squinty and implacable, "Give me my glasses."

"Glasses for a kiss?"

"Put it this way, Ty. Give me my glasses and I won't kick your ass when I find them again."

Nick's looking really kind of pissed and Tyson's not stupid, so he stops trying to convince Nick to sexual favours and retires with dignity to the couch.

"Maybe you could train Dex to find them," he says idly, thinking about the glasses that are currently hidden inside a lidded saucepan. "He could sniff them out whenever you lose them."

Half-asleep in his basket, Dexter's tail thumps at the sound of his name.

"Yes, Ty, I could. I could do that. Or you could stop hiding them."

Tyson heaves a put-upon sigh and slouches over to the hob to get them out the pan. "Here you go," he says and, without thinking, tosses them at Nick. Nick flails a hand out to catch them, and ends up smacking the glasses into the coffee table, where their plastic frame snaps neatly in two.

For a long moment, they just stare at each other - then Tyson does the sensible thing and runs.

Later, he knocks on Nick's door and then opens it, waving a little white flag of surrender (okay, it's less a white flag than a piece of manuscript paper stuck to a pencil, but the sentiment's the same). Nick is sitting gloomily on his bed. The glasses are gone, and since Nick's not squinting, he must have put his lenses in. The glasses are on the table, sellotaped clumsily down the middle. Tyson, feeling guilty, tries to find something that will brighten up the situation.

"You'll look like Harry Potter," he suggests.

Nick gives him a moody glare. "Thanks, that helps."

Tyson winces. "I'm sorry," he says truthfully. "I wasn't thinking."

"I know," Nick says. "If I thought you'd done it deliberately, I would have broken your nose."

"Really?"

"Of course not really. But I would have _liked_ to."

Tyson picks up the mangled glasses and winces as one side of them sags a little.

"How much did they cost?"

Nick snorts. "Too much. I know it's stupid to spend so much on a pair of glasses I hardly even wear, but. Eh."

Tyson gets it. Nick's glasses are neat, tidy black frames and nothing fancy. Mike calls them his emo-glasses. But Nick feels comfortable wearing them, and he wears them during downtime when he knows he won't be called upon to be anything other than himself. That's why Tyson gets it.

He turns round and waves the drunkenly lopsided glasses in Nick's face.

"Can I borrow these?"

"Knock yourself out."

Tyson knows himself almost as well as he knows Nick, and he knows he can be stupid and thoughtless sometimes - because, hell, who can't? But he'd be a bad person if he didn't try and fix what he broke, and he's honestly not that guy.

The tiny label on the side arm is a name of some kind, not one that Tyson recognises, not some big fashion house, and he has to google it before he finds out where he can buy frames like it in New York. Frames, he figures, shouldn't be too much of a problem, but it's going to be a bitch to work out what Nick's prescription is.

Nick’s contact lenses are just sitting in the bathroom, but Tyson knows from his mom and his brother's glasses that the prescriptions aren't the same, so it's going to take some weaselling.

In the end, he just calls Jennifer.

Jennifer laughs for about five minutes, but Tyson steels himself and suffers through it until she calms down and promises to ask her mother. In the meantime, Tyson gets some superglue and puts his DIY skills to the test.

The superglued glasses aren't perfect - one of the little twiddly things - the things that let the glasses rest on your nose - yeah, the left one's come off and the right one looks a little bent. Tyson puts them aside and decides to fix them tomorrow, when he's bought the little screws necessary. The snap to the bridge is a clean one, and Tyson's a genius with superglue, so in the end, Frankenspecs, as Tyson has taken to calling them, don't look too bad. They'll tide Nick over until Tyson gets him new ones, anyway.

When they're fixed, he leaves them on the same shelf as Nick's contact lenses and they languish there, unworn. Tyson feels a tiny twinge of guilt every time he sees them, and since the bathroom was, for a good few days, his centre of operation (Tyson had never made much of a pretence of sanity), there were an awful lot of guilty twinges. It's a relief when Jen rings back with Nick's prescription.

Tyson finally tracks down an all-but-identical pair and takes Nick's prescription along to the store when he buys them. They promise to have them made up for him in the next day or so, and he mooches back to the apartment, where Nick is fighting with an errant bassline, feeling productive and a little less like a giant asshole.

Predictably, the finished glasses take a fucking year to come through and then the optician rings at 9.30 in the morning, an exact three hours after Tyson went to bed. Groaning, he grabs some clothes and a slice of toast covered with tomato sauce and is ready to face the day. Sort of.

Still, it's worth it when he bangs on Nick's door an hour and a half later and certainly poorer. He spent the subway ride home planning how he was going to do this - Tyson likes presentation, likes to get things right - and so is very pleased that Nick is obviously still asleep, minus any vision enhancing apparatus.

Nick opens the door, still half asleep, and Tyson gently slides the new glasses onto his face, where they sit, a little crookedly.

Nick blinks blearily at him and straightens himself up again from where he’s leaned away from Tyson in surprise. "Ty, my glasses don't work anymore," he says, taking them off. This isn't the way Tyson had envisaged this going. He opens his mouth to correct Nick, then Nick squints at his glasses. "They're not broken anymore," he says redundantly.

"No," Tyson agrees, bouncing on his feet.

"You got me new glasses?"

"I broke the old ones," Tyson points out.

Nick slides the glasses on and grins at him. "If I hadn't already forgiven you, I would now," he tells him.

"Can we hug it out now?"

"Hug what out?" Nick asks, but he doesn’t complain when Tyson wraps his arms round him in a giant, over-enthusiastic hug. He might even have hugged back.


End file.
